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- [00:00]
Tracy Kronczak
That was where I witnessed a murder, couldn't do a thing about it because it had unraveled to the point where the mob kings were just openly themselves. And, you know, I was in the northeast part of Moscow in a neighborhood that, you know, was kind of rough and tumble in that era. And I'm walking to the subway with my friend Volodya. There's a guy, old guy in rags, down on his knees in a field just begging. And there's three guys in suits standing up around him. And I just see one guy look over just in time. I was like, oh, this is great. I look over just in time to see a guy pull a knife the size of his, like it's huge, out of his side pocket and just shove it right up into the guy's head.
- [00:46]
Jay Frost
Welcome to the PM Podcast, brought to you by Ever True Studios, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. With more than 25 years in nonprofit technology, Tracy Kronczak has worked across the ecosystem from server racks and on premise systems to cloud architecture, enterprise partnerships and AI strategy. They've served in leadership roles at Salesforce.org, microsoft's tech social impact initiative, Bonterra, and multiple non profit tech consultancies, while advising mission driven organizations on data governance, equity and long term sustainability. In this episode, we trace Tracy's journey from the strawberry fields of New Hampshire to witnessing a murder in Moscow, and finally to becoming a recognized voice at the intersection of technology and justice.
- [01:46]
Jeff Frost
Maybe I'll just start by asking you
- [01:47]
Jay Frost
about those things you were just addressing.
- [01:50]
Jeff Frost
You said you led 30 lives. What does that mean?
- [01:59]
Tracy Kronczak
I, for better or for worse in this life, have seen, I think, some of the best and the worst that our society, our country and our world has to offer. And I'll sort of frame it in that. I had a rural childhood growing up in 1970s, 1980s rural New Hampshire. We had a town of maybe 4,000 people in South Central New Hampshire. We were up there because at the time, my father's business was he worked for a company called Colesman. And what they did was create a guidance systems for missiles. They created compasses and guidance systems for tanks. So they were a government contractor. And dad had been with a company since he left the Navy. He was in the Korean War. And he was the person they came to when they were like, we don't really understand how to put all this together. Can you figure it out and come back to us. And he had a 25 year career there. And he died when I was very young. He died when I was 12 of a massive heart attack. So that gives you some insight into how stressful his career was. So, you know, at that time, we were living a very comfortably middle class life, and the switch kind of flipped overnight. My mom had to go back to school. I had to be a latchkey kid. You know, we went from very comfortably middle class to, oh my gosh, are we paying our mortgage? Because that's what really matters to keep us in the house. And that was a different lifestyle than my peers had at the time because New Hampshire was importing a lot of white collar workers to try and reinvigorate the state's economy. So a lot of my peers were like, oh, I went to this bomber jacket. You know, I bought this bomber jacket at a store. Or, you know, we did this fancy vacation or we have this fancy car. And my mom and my attitude was, if you want it, work for it. So my first job when I was 12 after my father had passed was for two summers in a row, I was out in the fields picking strawberries and vegetables with the migrant workers in New Hampshire and getting 25 cents a pint for every pint of strawberries I picked. And it was me. It was a bunch of migrants and some other kids. And that immediately gave me insight that I've used for the rest of my life. Because you fast forward this to 2026, where we are actively deporting folks to our country who are trying to make a better life for themselves. And I'm like, really? Because I know what it feels like to be sick from pesticides. I know what it feels like to stay out in the fields all and get sunburned. And you're telling me that you want to make the people who are working those jobs even more miserable than they already are by screwing around with their immigration status. It's not cool, it's not fair, and it's inhumane. But I did that for two summers and then I parlayed that into yard work for the rich kids in town. Boy, there are stories, but you jumped
- [05:40]
Jeff Frost
right past that biggest of all events about the loss of your father. And what kind of impact did that have on you? Obviously a financial impact and on your
- [05:48]
Tracy Kronczak
family financial impact for sure.
- [05:50]
Jeff Frost
What other how did that impact you emotionally?
- [05:56]
Tracy Kronczak
Here's what I'll say. Dad was not possibly the best dad on earth. He was abusive to mom and I in different ways. So it was a mixture of Profound loss and relief. And it took me years to reconcile. Not the profound loss, the relief. You know, why am I relieved? Oh, because certain horrible things are over and they're never coming back. So, you know, that gave me a therapeutic journey in my 20s that I'm really grateful I did. Yeah.
- [06:42]
Jeff Frost
Is it the same way for your mother, do you think? I mean, did you have conversations about that?
- [06:48]
Tracy Kronczak
We have. Mom was or is, should I say, while she was born in 1937. She's very much the silent generation. And, you know, the most I've ever gotten out of mom in 35 years since basically dad died was, you know, Tracy, your father wasn't the best of men. And that's about where mom's at with everything. And I think that's okay. Like, we all generationally cope with things different. She grew up in the Great Depression. Like the stories she tells me, you know, I still have. Somewhere in. In one of my files, I have their last coupon ration book for things like sugar, butter, flour, milk. We all have different generational trauma that I think we can either choose to unpick or not, but also informs our perspective on what we think is horrible or unsustainable or, you know, unfortunate.
- [08:05]
Jeff Frost
I'm also. I'm also imagining how the. The dry facts of the work that your father did must figure into the way you think about all the things you work on now, which I know we're going to discuss, but you said it does. Working on weapons systems. And then suddenly when he couldn't because you lost him, then there was nothing for the family. I mean, it's. That. That seems kind of a insane contrast.
- [08:37]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeah. Christmas went from tons of presents under the tree to socks and some new clothes, like hand me downs. And I was like, you know, it focuses on what's important. And I think it's only been very late in life that I've come to the realization that I'm not money motivated because I know what it feels like to live with a lot of money, and I know what it feels like to live without it. But what I do know and what I am motivated by very much is justice, because I know what it feels like to live with injustice and the profound uncomfortability that it. That it permeates throughout your entire life. And, you know, even as a white person, I say that knowing that there are some forms of injustice that I will simply never experience, that my friends and colleagues and peers have. And I. And I think it's, you know, you get into this comparative game and I. And I don't think the comparative matters as much as it is, you know, whatever emotional state it produces, I think we can all relate to and say it feels horrible and you want to make the world a better place. And most of my motivation in this world is centered around, let's make this better. Let's think bigger than next quarter's profit or let's think bigger than I got mine. Well, great. If you got yours, how can you help somebody else get theirs? You know, that's. That's the responsibility that we have when we, quote, unquote, get ours. Right? And that's what it has left me with, is this thread that has informed all of my actions and decision making, sometimes very naive, sometimes very wise, that has intersected with my career in nonprofit tech.
- [10:45]
Jeff Frost
And we'll get to that, obviously, but you had to understand tech before you got into that career. So how did you go from obviously helping support the family, picking strawberries, doing yard work, all those things that obviously were helping to just make things work. And it sounds like you were a solo child in that family, is that right?
- [11:04]
Tracy Kronczak
I was. I was an only child growing up. That's a whole funny other story. I. So I was always super motivated to, you know, do anything, because if I wanted something, I had to buy it myself, right? So. I did yard work for a few years. There were some really funny stories. Working for the rich kids whose grandparents, you know, working for their parents and grandparents. And then you see the kids in school, and I'm like, yeah, that was me working in your field. But my next door neighbor, he was a Marine, and he and his wife had lived on the block. And I mean, we were close to them. They were lovely human beings. We were close to them when my father was alive. We were close to them after he passed. And he sort of became this proxy in a lot of ways. And, you know, so the yard work. My mom got a job at a bank. And this is, by the way, pre savings and loan scandal, 1990s, early 1990s. Through that, she met the head teller who had just moved to a new bank that had opened up, and they were looking for tellers. I was 15 and a half. I was too young to be bonded, so I lied about my age because you could get bonded at 16. So I just kind of backed up my year of birth by one year. And then I started working as a teller, I think my sophomore year in high school. And that was a job that I did sophomore through senior year and into the summer prior to going to College. And this all connects because what I loved about the job more than anything else was that it was air conditioned. Like I loved it. I was like, oh God, I'm no longer in the heat and the humidity with all the bugs. And it was easy and it was fun and I had nice, fun colleagues.
- [13:13]
Jeff Frost
I did feel well either. It's, it's all, yeah, seasonal.
- [13:17]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeah. I didn't have to shovel snow in the winter and do yard work in the summer, you know, because after every snowstorm where there was a snow day, my friends went out sledding and skiing. I went out and I shoveled all my neighbors walks. And I would come home with like 40 or 50 bucks from doing that, which in that era was a ton of money. So it turns out I was really good at being a bank teller. And my senior year rolls around and the bank, and again I preface this by saying pre savings and loan scandal because there are many more banks. And the purpose of a bank in that era was to help the community be a better community. You know, small business helps loans. You know, it was like the Jimmy Stewart concept of the banks. Not like what we have today where they won't even break like a fifty dollar bill unless you have an account with them. And I'm like, come on, really? You know, so my senior year, my neighbor, he went to cornell on the GI Bill after World War II, he was a Marine in World War II Pacific theater. And he was like, you gotta go to this school. You're smart, you're talented, you have good grades, they will accept you, I will write you a letter, I will do anything to help get you into this school. And it broadened my own sense of what I should do. Because growing up the way I did, there were sort of three possible careers, you know, doctor, lawyer or engineer. I was the first one in my entire family to go to a non military institution after high school. So he helps get me into Cornell. And around like April May of my senior year, the bank is like, look, you're doing really good, we're expanding. I know you want to go to college, but if you stick around, we'll make you a junior loan officer. And I was like, the pay on that was like, I think it was like 35 or $40,000 a year. I was like, holy cow, that's amazing. So I tell my mom about it and I'm like, well, I might defer college. She told my neighbor. And I need to preface all of this with like this was now the late 80s, early 90s. It's an entirely different era in our country. And, you know, so mom and I were supposed to go to dinner over at their place one night, and he's like, oh, why don't you come over early? I was like, okay, great. You know, because when they were out of town, I used to care for their cats, and they had a lot of antiques that I loved looking at. And he was like, all right. So, you know, he and his wife, Marilyn. Oh, God, she was a gem. Mr. Stillman and Mrs. Stillman, you know, they're there, and I thought maybe he was asking me over to help her out in the kitchen or something. And he's sitting at the table and he's got a beer, and he's like, here, have a beer. And I'm like, okay, great. So he's like. I'm like, what's going on, Mr. Stillman? And he says very gently, he's like, your mom says, you're thinking about not going to school. And I was like, oh, my God. This loan on I35, 40 grand. Holy cow. How can I say no to it? And he stands up and he puts his hands down on the table, and he looks at me and he says, I did not land at Iwo fucking Jima so that you can be a loan officer at a shitty bank in New Hampshire. You are going to college. And I was like, okay, then that is what I will be doing. Yes. And that's how I went to college. And freakishly enough, what determined my path of studies in college were two things. Because, remember, doctor, lawyer, engineer. I was pretty good with math until I realized I wasn't. So I started at the school of engineering. I almost failed out miserably because one of the things that I have still to this day is a relatively eidetic memory. And I realized that how I was doing math was just kind of memorizing where everything was and arriving at the solution in the equation. And that breaks down when you are doing triple integral calculus. And it also breaks down when you are trying to calculate, back in that era, what was the sort of triple point of a metal ceramic interface for the purposes of creating superconductivity. So one of the events that had happened right as I was entering freshman year of college was the fall of the Soviet Union. The very first coup, matter of fact, it was like two days. It was August 19th, August 20th, 1991. Freshman year. August 21st is my birthday. So mom wakes me up and she's like, oh, we're going to do this for your birthday this weekend. And, oh, by the way, it looks like the Soviet Union's falling apart. Oh, and we're getting a hurricane. There was a hurricane coming up the eastern seaboard. It was like, all within the same day. So I kind of remembered that my father himself was half Russian and half German. Matter of fact, I have. He was an orphan in. Not he was an orphan, but his. His grandfather was an orphan. Sorry. I have discharge papers from Tsar Alexander III Royal army for his grandfather, who was the orphan back in that era. Other stories. Why do I identify with the immigrant experience? Because my mom in her later years did all of this genealogy work. She found everybody but my father's grandfather. And I was like, mom, the family legend has it he hopped off a ship coming out of Lithuania into New York, got associated with one of these Russian men's societies, and then brought the family over legitimately through Ellis Island. And just kind of after they all got their paperwork, was like, hi, me too. You know, I'm part of this family, too. So near as we could tell, he entered the country illegally. And so I decided to pivot to Russian and East European studies. I had just come out, much to the consternation of my family. That's a whole other mess.
- [20:38]
Jeff Frost
Well, that must have been a big deal if you just described your father as a person in the defense establishment. And the person who helped you get into school was a Marine Corps veteran from Iwo Jima.
- [20:50]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeah. Irish Catholic family, New England.
- [20:54]
Jeff Frost
Okay.
- [20:55]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeah. Very conservative. There's a sidebar story where they kind of tricked me to come down during fall break freshman year because my cousin had told them about me. And they were like, apparently. They were like, we just want to see you. We want to make sure you're okay. So I drive down to Long island from upstate New York, and it's a really weird vibe, like, intervention style vibe. And that's a Friday night in the Saturday. Saturday night. My cousin, who was the creator of this mess, pulls me aside and she says, you got to get the hell out of here. And I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, oh, you think you're going to church with the family tomorrow on Sunday, don't you? And I was like, that was, you know, they want to do this weird intervention thing. And she's like, no, no. They're going to bring you to a mental institution, and they want you to voluntarily commit to shock therapy.
- [21:58]
Jeff Frost
What. What did your cousin say to your Started this whole thing.
- [22:03]
Tracy Kronczak
You know, Gay Tracy came out this.
- [22:07]
Jeff Frost
And this is again, for those who didn't live through this era. Yeah, it was. It was a somewhat different time.
- [22:15]
Tracy Kronczak
Somewhat. Yes. So, you know, and she didn't say it to my mom, by the way. She said it to the family on Long island, who then told my mother, oh, boy.
- [22:27]
Jeff Frost
Okay, so you get this warning that you could be whisked off in a straight jacket. And what did you do?
- [22:34]
Tracy Kronczak
2am I left. I literally snuck out of the house on Long island at like 2 in the morning, packed up my car, drove back to school, went back to my dorm room. And it like. And it was not a very long drive. It was like five, six hour drive. And I remember very distinctly calling the house, and they answered the phone, and I was like, so I'm back in my dorm room. You will never see or hear from me again, and this is goodbye. And I didn't speak to my mother for. Or my family for years. Like, a good, like, freshman year summer. I stayed in Ithaca. I didn't go home. And mom, to her immeasurable credit, was the one that built the bridge back.
- [23:29]
Jeff Frost
And I will never stop paying for this on your own. Anyway, it was.
- [23:34]
Tracy Kronczak
I had a lot of scholarships. I had a lot of. I had two jobs and a scholarship. I had all sorts of stuff. And we did have. My dad did have some savings that was intended for me to go to college as well. So, like, between the savings for college, the scholarships that I had, and the two jobs that I was working schools paid for. But the story of my college is the story of how my mom put herself out there again and again and again to build the bridge back between me and her. She's like, tracy, I don't care about the family. This is about you and me. You're my child. I need to be here for you. Okay? So that was college. And I will never stop thanking her for that. Like, even to this day when I visit her, I was like, geez, mom, you really did an amazing thing for us in college by building our relationship back. So college, I did Russian and East European studies after kind of almost completely bombing out of engineering, learned a bit of Russian, and sophomore year, I won a scholarship to go over and study Russian at Moscow State Linguistic University. This is summer 93, which, if you're familiar with the history of the reason, was the summer of the second hardline coup attempt.
- [24:59]
Jeff Frost
This is with Yeltsin and the tanks.
- [25:02]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeltsin and the tanks and the White House and everything.
- [25:05]
Jeff Frost
Yes.
- [25:07]
Tracy Kronczak
I left town two weeks before that happened. And I still joke to this day some of my most intriguing memories Were my friend Lisa and I hiding under our dorm room windows, waiting for the riots and gunfire to stop in the streets, because society was falling apart over there. Whatever we had promised Russia as a country, we were not delivering on. Yeltsin was fundamentally corrupt. Matter of fact, the west loved him because we could manipulate him, but the Russians hated him. And a lot of the things that were supposed to happen didn't. So in 1993, everybody in Russia got. Well, I actually have this. Hold on one sec, here we go. I have it framed. In 1993, everybody got one of these things. Privatization, voucher. And what you were supposed to do was as a family or as a person, invest in the former state owned businesses. People were so desperately poor, the ruble was devaluating so quickly that a number of speculators went around and just bought these things up in moss and they would say, well, it's worth 10,000 rubles, I'll give you 5,000 rubles in cash right now. Because you don't know how far down the ruble is going to devalue. Those speculators became the oligarchs because they collected all of these things and bought huge shares of industry with them. So privatization didn't work very well. The neighborhood I lived in was a Georgian neighborhood. It was in an area of Moscow called Park Kulturi, which you may remember in latter years, they had a subway bombing there because of ethnic tensions. And it was really weird, man. Like, you could totally see the mob moving in day to day to day. There was a restaurant that myself, my friend Lisa, and all of us, we used to eat at. It was a Georgian restaurant. It was freaking delicious. And I'll never forget the day there was like six or eight of us there. And the waitress comes up, we just gotten our food, and she says, I'm so sorry, you need to leave. And we were like, what the hell? We just got our food. And she was like, you don't understand. You can take the food with you. You need to leave because someone more important than you needs this restaurant. And we're like, okay, so we took the food walk outside. There's a bunch of cars and guys with guns just hanging out, waiting to go inside. And you know, if you ask why today in the only forum I have left, which is LinkedIn, I don't have any other social media of any sort. Why I'm still saying none of this is normal and our democracy is in trouble. It's because I have seen what a fundamentally unraveling political and social and economic country looks like. And that was Russia in the early 1990s. And it's bad.
- [28:42]
Jeff Frost
And you were there.
- [28:43]
Tracy Kronczak
It's really bad.
- [28:44]
Jeff Frost
You were there for just that time, or did you return?
- [28:47]
Tracy Kronczak
I went back summer 94.
- [28:50]
Jeff Frost
So you just couldn't get enough of this? Obviously, the danger. No, but the appeal was. What was the appeal for you? You, at this point? Because you've seen the risk.
- [28:58]
Tracy Kronczak
I had the scholarship that I had won. What I was doing was collecting information about what the LGBT folks in Russia were doing during that era.
- [29:09]
Jeff Frost
That must have been dangerous, too.
- [29:12]
Tracy Kronczak
It was, and it wasn't. People were much more optimistic than they, you know, probably had rights to be if they knew the future, but they didn't. I got to interview some amazing activists, including Masha Gessen, who now writes, I think, for the New York Times. All these folks were in and around Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I interviewed them and talked to them about what they hoped, what they wanted to achieve. Summer 94 was a bad, bad summer for Russia. I was living in a not so great neighborhood, and I was staying with the family of a teaching assistant friend of mine from school. Very funny story about how I got in and out of Russia that summer as well. But that was where I witnessed a murder. Couldn't do a damn thing about it because it had unraveled to the point where the mob kings were just openly themselves. And, you know, I was in the northeast part of Moscow in a neighborhood that, you know, was kind of rough and tumble in that era, and I'm walking to the subway with my friend Volodya. There's a guy, old guy in rags, down and down on his knees in a field just begging. And there's three guys in suits standing up around him. And I just see one guy look over just in time. I was like, oh, this is great. I look over just in time to see a guy pull a knife the size of his, like, it's huge, out of his side pocket and just shove it right up into the guy's head. And I'm like, well, on you. What do we do? And he's like, we fucking run. And we hope to God they don't see us because it will be us next if they see that we saw that. That's my fear. That is why to this day, I worry that the course we're on as a country is going to lead to those outcomes. And if we don't do everything we can to stop the devolution of our lone law, I already know what that looks like. It looks like getting away with murder, literally.
- [31:46]
Jeff Frost
Russia at that time, I believe the civil society was weak and somewhat fragile, but there were also people who were really strong advocates for it and starting to work for it. You must have interfaced with them when you were doing these interviews or just witnessed it. As an observer.
- [32:04]
Tracy Kronczak
I met at the State Department, and I got to witness it as an observer. I didn't interview them so much as I had a friend at the State Department who was kind of keeping an eye on me because he was like, you really shouldn't be talking to people about this stuff.
- [32:23]
Jeff Frost
But they were seeing the future.
- [32:26]
Tracy Kronczak
Yeah, they were. And in a different way, he saved my life because a lot of times I would meet up with people at bars. I would meet up with people at clubs. He actually. I remember going to a bar with him and a few other folks, and that's all I remember. And I woke up a day and a half later in his apartment, and he was like, oh, hi, welcome back. And I was like, what the hell just happened? He was like, oh, yeah, you got roofied pretty hard, and we all saw it happen, but you didn't, so we just got you home. To this day, I have no memory of almost 48 hours. I remember walking into the bar. I remember ordering a drink, and then I remember waking up in his apartment.
- [33:25]
Jeff Frost
So how long were you eventually there before you came back? And how did you decide to come back? I mean, I know this was an academic program, but it was. When you're in the thick of things, the schedule is kind of. It becomes its own. So.
- [33:38]
Tracy Kronczak
Yes. Yes, that is correct. So I just made notes. I talked to people. I made lots of phone calls. I, like, walked around, I knocked on doors. You name it, I did it, and I was there. So summer 93, I was there about three months. Summer 94, I was there about three months. But I needed to go. And I. I swore after I left, I would never go back to. Never go back to Russia because I'd seen too much. And, you know, my friends who were closest to me, this was now entering into my senior year of college, they were like, are you all right? And I was like, not really, no. Not really, no. So Russia in that era had also sort of very slippery bureaucracy and bureaucratic process. I had a professor. You were supposed to be invited by somebody to go to Russia in that era to get your visa. I had a professor who was a visiting professor from Moscow State University. And she's like, oh, no problem. Pulls out some letterhead and a Russian typewriter. Writes me a formal letter of invitation from Moscow State University, I submit it and I get my visa. No problem. The visa in that era had three parts. You took one part and you gave it to Russia. When you entered, you were supposed to take a second part and give it to your inviting institution for them to validate. And then you brought the second part and the third part back across the border where they took the last piece of it. It was like a three tear piece of paper. Never got it validated by Moscow State, obviously. So I'm leaving Russia in like august 94 and I can barely just. I'm like, in the airport and I'm just like, I need to get out, I need to get out, I need to get out. And this, I get up, some border crossing and there's this very sort of. In that era, she probably would have been my age. So like 50s era career army woman, very polite, you know, how's your day? Good. This is all in Russian. How's your day? Good. Very good. You know, she's like, do you have your paperwork? I'm like, of course I do. I give her my visa. And it was like her attitude shifts. She's like, where's your validation? And I was like, what validation? She's like, well, it says here you were a student at Moscow State University. Didn't they take your passport and visa? And I was like, yeah. And she's like, well, they didn't stamp it. And I was like, I don't know what to say. And she's like, well, I have to call somebody. And I pull the only move I know how to do. I just immediately burst into English and start crying. And I'm like, please God, I don't know what's happening. I don't know what they did. And because I knew a little bit about Russian culture, they don't like drama in the least. She just gets like zero to rage. Takes the passport stamp, slams it down, throws my passport back. And she's like, never come back. And I was like, okay. And that's how I got out of Russia
- [37:24]
Jeff Frost
and presumably did not return. But, but, but I did. Oh, well, wait a minute. So you, you finished school?
- [37:32]
Tracy Kronczak
I finished school.
- [37:33]
Jeff Frost
Then you.
- [37:34]
Tracy Kronczak
I went to get a master's of public administration at nyu. I worked for a private LGBT grant making foundation. It was really great.
- [37:43]
Jeff Frost
Like, that's how you, this field, get
- [37:47]
Tracy Kronczak
into this field, because of public policy. Because I thought maybe what I wanted to do is run for Congress and, you know, change. Do good.
- [37:58]
Jeff Frost
Right?
- [38:00]
Tracy Kronczak
You can tell I'm a little cynical on politics this day and age, but I left New York for San Francisco in early 99 and that's kind of what kicked it all off. Public policy and working for non profits, working for foundations. And you know, I picked up two fundamental skills from my parents growing up from my mother. I know how to sew and oh God, do I know how to sew very well. And now I'm teaching my stepdaughter that which is really cool. And dad, I used to just hang out and watch him work. So you know all of his little everything about like here's what you do with an electrical outlet or here's how you figure this out or how you do whatever. I sort of picked up that knack of figuring out how things worked. And in the era of nonprofit tech that we were in, which was sort of post.com boom and I have a whole other set of stories about that because for a while I worked for PR for as a PR consultant for dot com companies which in that earth seemed to involve going to a lot of parties and doing a lot of drugs. You know, there was a lot of
- [39:26]
Jeff Frost
etherware in those days too, I believe.
- [39:28]
Tracy Kronczak
Oh yeah, there was a lot of everything in those days. Kara Swisher's book deeply resonated with me. Apparently I didn't know this, but I landed in the sort of dot com boom in the early 99 and she landed as an established journalist in June 99. And it's very clear to me by some of the incidents that she relates in her latest book, Burn Book. And I was like, oh shit, we're at the same party. Or like oh shit, we saw the same event unfold in real time. So I had a started in in the tech era and I realized there's money and there is access. And then I went back and I worked for a couple of years for Tides foundation. And then I really was the person that I started working for a non profit. It was a national racial justice nonprofit. First as an assistant, then as a research assistant, then as a technology assistant, then as a manage a three office national organization. All because one day my first year I got in a fight with our executive director. And he was like, oh Tracy, like this computer's gone bupkis. Here's 200 bucks. Go to the store in Chinatown and buy a new one. And I was like, I will not do that. And he was like why? And I was like, because the store in Chinatown is already selling machines three years old. I will however go on to Dell.com and I will order a new machine from there for you. And he was like, well, okay, do that. So I did that. And then like the next day he's like, tracy, that fucking computer costs 700 bucks. And I was like, yes, and it will last you four years. So you can either pay 300 bucks every year for a three year old machine, or you can pay 750 once and have it last you longer and spend less money over time. And he was like, oh, you should do this stuff for us. And that's how I got into nonprofit tech.
- [41:54]
Jeff Frost
And that became a whole career. Obviously, now we're talking about Salesforce. Bonterra are two names that people would know and others so much. If you boil it down, what was the connection between what you were doing before when you were studying and just experiencing these things that were so important to you, and then working in this field where you're in the bowels of the beast? Because tech is not the PR part where you started.
- [42:26]
Tracy Kronczak
No, I wish you were. Those parties were great. They really were. I was like, wow, here is some, you know, circus at the end of days kind of stuff. I take it that we did good work in that era, by the way, because all of our customers as their companies were folding. I would start right around 2000, 2001, I started getting these really bizarre phone calls. And it was like, hey, Tracy, I know it's the 6th of April and you just sent us the March invoice, but why don't you go ahead and send us another one, like right now, today, and if possible, before 4pm and what I didn't realize what was happening was they were doing us a favor by getting our invoice in before the courts said, you don't have to pay for anything that comes in after this. As their companies were folding one by one. Here's the thread that connects it all. And anybody who knows me or even knows me reputationally will relate to this being a pain in the ass, really. I worked for this national racial justice nonprofit for, gosh, eight, nine years, and I was a pain in the ass to every technology company, including Salesforce, because I was like, why doesn't your shit work for us? Why do I have to contort everything to make it work? And there's emails between me and some people who went on to be really interesting executives in the world when I'm like, your platform is fundamentally crap. How come you didn't think this through? And somehow in that era, it got me involved with building what is now the very deprecated nonprofit success pack on Salesforce because I had opinions and thoughts about how things should work. And I eventually parlayed that into a consulting job in 2011 doing Salesforce. And that was a whole career as a consultant, a business owner. I became an mvp, I think largely because they thought maybe it'll shut me up. Because I kept asking questions like, it seems like you guys really just want to sell licenses. And what I want to do is create a tool for the ecosystem. You know, like, maybe you could invest more in these things to make it a better tool, and that might actually help your license sales. Somehow. I made it through that entire time in my career, including almost three years employed at the former salesforce.org not realizing that they don't give a shit. They care about the next 90 days, and they care about what looks good to tell a good story about to support the next 90 days worth of revenue. I was fundamentally naive to that. I was still a pain in the ass. And I was told when I left, you are on a list of people that we are watching, so you better watch what you say about us. And that was direct from a very, like, so far up on the tree that I was like, why do you care? But they did. And the reason they did was because I was a pain in the ass even when I was an employee, because I discovered they were selling to hate groups. And I was like, why are you selling to the following X organizations? You realize these are organizations that are using your technology to tear our country apart. Art. Now, of that list, I can only articulate two that are known knowns. One was Alliance Defending Freedom. It uses marketing cloud. I've scrapped it up with those guys since the 1990s when they had a different name. I can't remember what. But they are the legal arm of the Heritage Foundation's movement to execute Project 2025, essentially. And I was like, why? Why? You guys, this isn't. These people are tearing our country apart, and you're selling them the same software that you sold my national racial justice organization. Answer me why? And I never got an answer as to why.
- [47:25]
Jeff Frost
This is a. This is a quite. Almost a broader question than one company. I mean, obviously, because this is something you've talked about a lot and written about, which is what obligation do companies have, if any, to employ a. I don't know, a statement of ethics in terms of who they're willing to sell to and support? And I'm not speaking of one company here. I'm just speaking of all companies.
- [47:54]
Jay Frost
Do they.
- [47:55]
Jeff Frost
Do they have these policies, and if so, are they in any way obligated to support them? And as you just said, they were supporting a racial justice organization through, in this one case, through a piece of software in one place and then supporting or, you know, providing their software to another potentially, you know, completely adversarial organization to this principle. So what is. When you think about all of that together?
- [48:21]
Jay Frost
Yeah.
- [48:21]
Jeff Frost
Where does that take you in terms of thinking about the tech industry and how it does or does not have a set of principles that it supports?
- [48:30]
Tracy Kronczak
It does not. It's taken me 25 years in the tech industry to realize it does not. And therefore it's incumbent on us as individuals to be the moral compasses of the industry. And the tragic thing about the tech industry, in my opinion, is that you can get enough money and enough status and enough prestige and enough power that you can kind of ignore your own moral compass if you really want to, because suddenly the problems of everyday people are not your problems.
- [49:09]
Jeff Frost
Let me push back a little bit, as if, you know, some of these companies were sitting here and ask this as a devil's advocate.
- [49:17]
Tracy Kronczak
Sure.
- [49:17]
Jeff Frost
Why is that important?
- [49:18]
Jay Frost
Important?
- [49:19]
Jeff Frost
Why is it important that companies have what might be described as a moral compass? And I'm not saying they don't have one. I'm just. But. But for the sake of discussion, why should they?
- [49:29]
Tracy Kronczak
Because the law defines them as people, because they are actors and participants in and enablers of our economy and political system. And if you are a person who is an actor, participant, and enabler of our economic and political systems, then need a moral compass. Otherwise, you're just an amoral entity out for your own good. And you know what? That's how I play Dungeons and Dragons, because there's no consequences. I'm like, ah, I could, you know, rescue you, or you seem to have a thousand gold pieces I could use. I could just kill you. Like, do we want that kind of sociopathy with the enormous amount of fiscal resources it brings to bear and control right now over our federal government, to have no moral compass. When the law itself says you're a person, it's tragic. And I think of some of the people who are my heroes when I think of corporate ethics, like Alison Taylor, who wrote an amazing book called Higher Ground, and, you know, she really unpicks the damnation of companies because they have so much power that when shit happens, George Floyd, you know, everybody goes to them and says, do something. And they may not even be fundamentally equipped to do anything because they've never had to think about what it is they could do. So Allison's work really says, hey, look, spend a minute to think about the externalities that your business creates and what are the issues that are in alignment with what you're trying to accomplish in the world that you can support so that when things like George Floyd happens, you know, everybody runs to your doorsteps and does says, do something. You don't do what every company in that area did, which was a bunch of performative histrionics, you know, oh, Black Lives Matter. Oh, we stand with George Floyd. Well, it's not about when you're standing. It's when you sit down that the decisions are made and the rubber meets the road on what you actually value as a company. And Alison's book's amazing because what she's trying to do is provide a tool set to companies to say, we are appalled by something like George Floyd, but we have thought through what we care about most as a company, and that is cleaning up the Pacific from trash. So while we are appalled and horrified at this thing, we are going to continue to focus on the thing that we know is in alignment with our values, which is cleaning up trash from the great Pacific trash gyre. And I wish more companies thought that way. I wish more leaders in the tech industry weren't sociopaths who blew with whatever wind of political expediency happens to come through the door.
- [53:01]
Jeff Frost
I have to ask you, given that many of those things happen when many of the things you've described happened, when either they didn't have the apparatus or the policies to do those things, but also they were not in the same political environment that they find themselves in now. That's also true of nonprofits, and they have.
- [53:26]
Tracy Kronczak
And look at what Diane Yentl's doing.
- [53:28]
Jeff Frost
Right. Well, and I'm thinking about nonprofits as a whole, that they've been confronted with these issues, and sometimes it makes them think, well, we have to be the turtle. We have to be Yertle the turtle and tuck our heads in in order to protect both ourselves, but also those we support. And others have said, no, we have to march forward. That's more like what Diane Yentl has done. So what are your thoughts about the responsibilities of especially nonprofits, which are very vulnerable in a time like this? What is their responsibility?
- [54:02]
Tracy Kronczak
I wrote a piece about this in December of 2024, and I said, the era that we're about to enter into is going to be like nothing America has ever seen before. It's going to want to turn people on each other and Organizations are going to be directly targeted by the federal government for who they serve, the language they use, and the communities they engage with. What has happened in the past year is exactly that. There is a class of nonprofits that have lost jobs, whose staff are under federal attack. The most interesting podcast in my life I listened to was about a guy who was on Nixon's list of enemies and the living hell that it made his life. So the federal government is making living hell out of some of these nonprofits pulling money trying to interfere with the communities they serve. So now we have two classes of nonprofits. When we didn't before, we have those that are under direct federal attack and need to do anything and everything possible to save their staff, their donors, their communities they serve, their constituents, their volunteers, and then we have the safe ones. And I don't begrudge a single nonprofit under attack for battening down the hatches and saying, we got to protect our peace right now. What pisses me off is when I see the very apolitical non profits and foundations saying, oh, it's such a tragic time, but you know, we also don't want to be under attack and we can't do anything to save this. You've got money, you've got resources. You can act as a fiscal agent. Should the federal government start pulling nonprofit status of organizations it deems anti American? Private foundations in this country, we celebrated when one foundation increased its giving by 1% this past year. And it is offensive to me how little that industry has changed in response to this direct attack on charitable institutions. You know, bullshit. Your responsibility as a nonprofit, your responsibility as a private foundation, and frankly, the other industry that just annoys the heck out of me now are DAFs that are being marketed as generational charity, which is just another collection mechanism for undistributed money. Your responsibility right now is to open up the floodgates of money, figure out how you can get engaged with issues that you never even knew exist for the sake of saving our civil society and our country and funding, helping hide and helping serve communities you might not even have known existed, who are now under direct federal attack.
- [57:24]
Jeff Frost
Now, before, you said that for those who knew you or knew your reputation, they knew that you, you would annoy those you worked with. You see these companies in these industries and you've just shown us how because you're asking people to do maybe what at least you see that they are not doing at a time when people have real needs. Now, let me ask you a different question. You have lived through A bunch of things. And you're continuing to look forward. So what gives you the juice to do that? I mean, you found the, you know, you found all these pain points that you're working on all the time. But what do you do for yourself so that you can come to this work every morning renewed?
- [58:15]
Tracy Kronczak
I'll be candid and say, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'm not renewed at all. And yeah, that's my voice quavering because past year has been hell. What do I do? I walk my dog a lot. I ride my bike a lot. When I can, I go skiing, which is. When I grew up, skiing was a family sport. Now it's like a sport only of the wealthy. So yay, I can afford a season ticket and gas to get to Tahoe. So I ski. I still pack my own lunch because I'm like, oh, no, I'm not paying $19 for a bowl of chili. No, thank you. I write. I love to write. Matter of fact, about 10 years ago, I'm a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy. And about 10 years ago I was like, I think I can write the kind of stuff I like to read. So, you know, and the influence of authors in my life is as broad as, like, China Mieville to Jacqueline Carey to Madeline L. Engel to Stephen King. So I've started writing stories and now I'm in that sort of damnation of can't get published unless you have an agent. Can't get an agent unless you're published. But not all of them are great either. Like, I reread something recently and I was like, oh, you really need to like, edit this. But some of them are extraordinary. Some of them, when I write them, I didn't think much of them. And then I came back to them and I was like, oh, this is really good. And if you read any book on writing, I think that's the writer's journey is to constantly reevaluate. I've recently really come to embrace caring for my family in a way that brings me a load of joy. Like, I have step kids and it's like a nightly ritual that my oldest and I would go out and we do like a big long half hour, 40 minute walk and talk, and he just talks about whatever's on his mind. My youngest, she is the little crafter. So I'm like, you know, I remember doing what my mom did. And that is, come here. You want to see how a sewing machine works? You want to learn how to sew a straight line? You want to learn why you need to use a pattern like all of this stuff. I don't do the best at taking care of myself because I have the kind of brain where everything feels freaking urgent all the time. And it's only been in the past five years that I've been like, oh, wait, we can actually stack rank that a little bit, you know, so. And I can feel myself slowing down, too. You know, I. I joke about this, but it's true. In the tech industry, particularly for women, you cross 45 or 50, you know, you get this, like, little symbolic picture of a glue factory on your desk, and it's like the constant reminder that you should be grateful for whatever shitty tech job you have. Because the alternative is, here's the glue factory, a damn workhorse. And it's a different journey for men than it is for women, because men, of course, get older and wiser and fonds of wisdom, and women just get sort of annoyed, burnt out, and sick of tolerating the fact that even in 2026, they're still not listened to in any great regard in the tech industry in aggregate. So, you know, I'll see what I want to do next. I've started my own thing this year. I basically have three value propositions. You know, I can be a stand in CIO for hire. And I think in the old days, I wanted to be much more strategic about technology. I was like, here's the master plan for three to five years. And this day and age, what I tell people is, look, nothing surprises me in this industry. And the things that we thought mattered 10 and 15 years ago, like feature function, parity, and all of this, don't actually matter right now. What matters is you evaluate your capacity tolerance for change, budget, and desire to move things forward for yourself. And I'll just point you in the right direction and be like, here, go here, look at this. Try this. Start here. You're going to have just as good experience with this pile of stuff as you are with that pile of stuff. So that's one. The thing that I've been trying to do for years is the second thing that I want to do is businesses themselves. I've seen a lot of good, bad, and indifferent in the corporate world. And there are some great actors, let's call out great actors for what they are. Patagonia is a great actor. Ben and Jerry's used to be before the acquisition, and now I'm reading the book. But businesses don't know how to address nonprofits. So sometimes I find myself in conversation with business owners or executives, and they're like, yeah, I really care about it, but I have no idea, like, how to help, what to do. Like, if our stuff would even work for nonprofits, Let me be your damn guide. I've seen inside of five ecosystems. Blackbaud, Bonterra, Microsoft, Salesforce, HubSpot. I've seen technology work good, bad, and indifferent. I've seen philanthropy work good, bad, and indifferent. If your business wants to know how to address this ecosystem, let's sit down and figure it out together. And I'll give you all the pros and cons of everything from life. Here's a freemium model that you can set and forget to. Here's things that are going to create expectations and why they're going to create expectations and what you can do to solve those things. So that's value prop number two. And the third thing I would say is, despite being a pain in the ass for 20 years and running, people occasionally ping me just to solve hard shit. They're like, tracy, you're a researcher. You're a strategist. Like, here's a problem. I don't know how to solve it. Do you have any ideas? And I'll look at it, and I'll be like, well, it might not be the best solution, but here is a solution could work. So, you know, when I say TK Endeavors is, you know, research, strategy, and partnerships, I mean it. Because the other thing that I know really well is the power of partnered businesses with each other and how working together, just like we did as community organizers, businesses can create ecosystems of huge benefit for nonprofits, but also just for their own sake. So that's kind of what I've been on about nowadays. I'll let you know in a year if it has any traction. I might just go to a job fair here in downtown Livermore where I live, and be like, gosh, it really feels good to be a bank teller again. But we'll see.
- [66:32]
Jeff Frost
Well, I don't think you're gonna be going back to the strawberry field either, but it does sound like you.
- [66:37]
Tracy Kronczak
I do have a lot of friends who are vintners, and I'm like, show me how picking season and crushing season works. Because it looks like an unbelievable amount of hard work, but it looks really rewarding.
- [66:51]
Jeff Frost
It sounds like you also have a good relationship with your whole family or many of the people in your family, especially your mother. So when you go back and you talk about the arc of all this, not just the current political environment and things like that, which I know you discussed, but also just. Just life, you know, as mother and child. What is that conversation like today?
- [67:14]
Tracy Kronczak
Times change and people change. You know, mom and I. I feel like if the worst battle that mom and I have to fight is that I'm no longer 15 and living under her roof whenever I come and visit, then we're doing great, you know. And, you know, she's still deeply Catholic. She's still, you know, that New Yorker moved to New Hampshire. Right. But her own perspective is broadened, you know, and, like, sometimes she brings things to me and I'm like, mom, I don't have the bandwidth for this, but I'm really glad you're thinking about it. Wow. And we respect each other for who we are now. Like, I have a very deep and loving respect for her faith. I have a very different faith. You know, I didn't even get into this, but somewhere in the past 10 years, I also became ordained in a goddess church in Geyserville, California. So I'm an ordained goddess priestess in the Temple of Isis in Geyserville. I'm also a hierophant there, which is a teacher of the faith. So faith plays an enormous amount of, like, an overstated amount of a role in my life. And that keeps me going sometimes because I have to trust that. But the entities that are bigger than me see things differently than I do. They see the world four dimensionally, five dimensionally. I don't know. You know, maybe they see time and space the way that I see a Rubik's Cube. So maybe when I have faith that there is a plan that they can see that I can't by my own human limitations, that gives me comfort. So I can recognize that in my mom, even if it's in very different directions. You know, I think we're at peace with each other. There's some things that we will never talk about, and that's okay. But she. The thing that I should give credit where credit is due. She's taught me two things that I carry with me to this day. One is try, even if you can't always succeed at it. Just try to be nice to other people. And God's. No, I fail at that, as we all do. And the other thing that she taught me, that is kind of also the connective thread here is Tracy. Whatever else is true, true, you can do something to make somebody else's life better. And she taught me that from a very young age, be it donating, be it helping out at a food pantry, be it whatever. And everything that I'd experienced in my life has led that to be true. And I want to live in a world where we as individuals and I do rope to our conversation, I do rope businesses into this because remember, they are people, too. Where we as people are motivated not by the next 30, 60, 90 days of what whatever we can get, but what makes this world and someone else's life a better life.
- [71:10]
Jay Frost
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM podcast. You can learn more about Tracy's work at Pledge no Hate at PledgeToHate Tech. Our thanks to our sponsor, Evertrue, the leader in donor engagement and fundraising intelligence, helping nonprofits find, engage and inspire their supporters. Our producer is Jack Frost, and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor provided courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
- [71:38]
Jeff Frost
If you found this conversation valuable, make
- [71:41]
Jay Frost
sure to subscribe wherever you like to listen. And don't forget to check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise all part of
- [71:49]
Jeff Frost
the Philanthropy Mastermind series.
- [71:51]
Jay Frost
Until next time. I'm Jeff Frost.
- [71:54]
Jeff Frost
Thanks for joining me.